Student Area

I did task number 40 – Heal yourself

http://www.learningtoloveyoumore.com/reports/40/40.php

Not sure if this is how she intended it but I just rolled with it….

Assignment #16 Make a paper replica of your bed. I felt like this assignment tackled identity with elegance and subtly. I was very conscious of exactly what parts of this private place were created and shown.

I drew the news, focusing on the recent Hong Kong protests. The center of the protest is C.Y. Leung, who is being pressured by protesters to step down. I found 2 pictures of him, one of him giving a thumbs up with a smile, and another one of protesters, who walks around with a giant sign of his face, edited so the eyebrows are angled to look eviler, and sharp fangs sprout out of his mouth. While drawing, I realized that it is a bit unfair for all this anger to be directed at him, since the true cause of the protest is Chinese government’s policy, not his. It really let me get another perspective on this current event.

Assignment #53
Give advice to yourself in the past.

In this Assignment, I was basically asked to make a list of advice I have for my past self. This is what I cam up with:

“Advice for Swetha at age 12,

Ok, so your like maybe 12 years old now so I know a lot of this is going to go over your head.
That’s why I wrote this for you.
Read it over and over again and take any advice you can.

First. When you make a friend in 3rd grade do not waste a single tear on her. I know she’s mean and rude and there’s so much drama around her but in middle school she’ll finally stop hanging out with you.

Second, don’t worry about getting along with your sister because when you parents drag you to India, you two will be the only English speakers around. She literally has no choice but to love you.

Third, When You get your first Honors English teacher don’t get so scared of her. Please do not listen to a word she says. She’ll tell you about how much harder life will be from then on but let me assure you nothing can be as pointlessly difficult as her class. You do not need to know how much gallons of water are in the Mississippi river just because your reading Huckleberry Finn. That was just her BSing.

Fourth, Don’t stick around the Anime club too much. Most of them are weird, and it gets even weirder when it moves to the library and its not just limited to high schoolers.

However, do go to anime conventions. Go to tons of them because you’ll make tons of friends. Take your own friends to them. It’ll be a blast.

Sixth, Your college is going to be Carnegie Mellon. Don’t bother applying to like 10 colleges. Do yourself a favor and score above 2000 on your SAT or else your parents will be holding it over your head your whole life. Also, In high school everyone tells you AP exams don’t really help in college. Lies! They help a ton so take as much of those things as you can!

Finally, Take moments to love your dog TONS because you will miss him every day in college. Oh yeah, you convince your parents to get a dog in 8th great, good job!

Luckily you don’t mess up a ton in your life to remember that in high school when you feel like a screw up. Also, don’t do anything your not comfortable with, honestly none of it even matters when your older. No one will ever care how many guys you dated or how great your wardrobe was.
That’s it for now, keep up all your grades, remember to have fun, and love your family.

Good Luck!

With Affection,
Your Much Older Self”

The fun part was trying to figure out how to deliver this letter. I was originally thinking about mailing the letter to my address when I was twelve but that would just reach my parents :/ How do I reach my specific younger self? Then I remembered that I was an avid player on neopets when I was younger until I got locked out of my account. I have a new account now that I play on occasionally so I decided to send this list to my old neopets account since the only person to have ever used it was my younger self.

My old user profile:

Sending the Message:

Read/watch these 3 contributions:

Contribution to a Situationist Definition of Play – Guy Debord

Jane McGonigal: Gaming can make a better world – TED talk

Gamification and Governmentality (Page 5) – Niklas Schrape

And write a short response as a comment below here. Some starting points:

• What large scale changes happened since the 1958 Situationist text, and how did they affect the notions of play and work?
• Do you recognize in you or your gamer friends the skills Jane McGonigal talks about, the things that gamers are getting good at? Is her talk a provocation or part of a trend some critics refer as solutionism?
• Can you imagine gamification projects that could push the “libertarian paternalism” described in the 3rd essay to the extreme?

LONG LIVE THE KING! is a competitive social drinking game for 4 to 15 players.

PREMISE:

Drinking games are fundamentally about social drinking without feeling weird about it. We’re awkward creatures who grease the wheels with a light game. But what if the game wasn’t so light? What if the game pit players against each other and facilitated imbalanced drinking and conspiratorial thinking?

(click for larger version.)

Click here for a PDF of the rules.

Premise:

A mod of the classic board game Monopoly that focuses on: sped pace of gameplay, greater player engagement, better balance between chance & strategy and increased realism regarding housing market through uncertain property values which leads to gambling feel.

Downloads:

Rules PDF
Board PNG

Candy Land: The Game of Sweet Revenge

Candy Land: The Game of Sweet Revenge encourages players to act out against the confines of traditional board game etiquette. Players eat, lick, and bite each other’s candy game pieces while trying to shuttle five of their own to the safe zone at the end of the rainbow path. Winning means a feast of all the candy on the board you can steal, but revenge plays can drop the leading player into last place. Players take turns choosing the most advantageous color combinations from a hand of color cards to move their candies to the end. If they land on another candy, moving either backwards or forwards, they can steal that candy for themselves. Candies are only safe once bitten into/licked, or once they have reached the end. By moving along the board, players activate mini-games like candy-hide-and-seek, in which players steal a neighbor’s candy and hide it on their person. Each turn players get to guess where their candy ended up, and only after finding it does that candy go back into play. These subgames, in combination with stealing and revenge mechanic, bring strategy and complexity to a once frivolous, quiet game.

Rachel Moeller, Michelle Ma, Maryyann Landlord

Experimental Game Design

 Making Board Games Better: Candy Land

 Candy Land is a game that teaches children the etiquette of board games. The system uses a universally child-appealing subject matter, candy, as flattening flavor and has enough color to hold a toddler’s attention long enough to have them be still and quiet for a 15 minute game. The aim of Candy Land: The Game of Sweet Revenge is to thwart the indoctrination of the original game. The revision reaches a player’s inner selfish, antagonistic bully and reinforces socially unaccepted behavior with the same candy that made the original game so innocent.

The theme of greed was instituted with the choice to play with actual candies and the steal mechanic. Physical candy adds a depth of motivation to the game and a painful edge with which to wound other players. Candy makes the game serious, turning it into a battle of tangible resources, not just points or positions. This meant the pain and satisfaction of revenge also had to be present in gameplay. Stealing, originally done by playing one of the many steal cards in the deck of colored square cards, gave players that satisfaction. The cards were scrapped in favor of landing on the same space another player occupies. This adds gestural depth to the game, and actually taking away another’s candy forces the stealing player to act out their greed, loosening their control over their inhibitions, until by the end of the game, play has devolved into a messy, polar experience.

A side effect of stealing was that a single player could be ganged up on and quickly run out of candies or be left powerless. To prevent this from happening, “blue shell” cards were added to the color square deck. These “Revenge is Sweet” cards had the potential to wildly swing the game from one losing state to another. Still, players would occasionally end up losing their candies or would give up if they couldn’t draw a comeback card. To combat this, a risk-reward subgame system was implemented in the Child’s Play cards. Each initiated a game a small game related to traditional children’s games. like hide and seek, to be played in the midst of the central game. This would help a down-on-his-luck player make a triumphant comeback or sacrifice himself for another player. These subgames ended up introducing a lot of downtime each round, but this was unavoidable in strategizing the game. Egging another player to move faster ended up enhancing the childish, peer-pressure like experience and was a retained element.

Most playtesters found the subgame structure to be entertaining, even if it slowed the round. The game did not appeal to all personalities and did not equalize every type of player to a “child” state. For example, the Hide-and-Seek subgame, in which players hide their neighbor’s candy somewhere on their person and take turns guessing where that candy went, had a general consensus of being “gross.” While most players preserved their dignity by expressing this opinion verbally, the first locations guessed were almost always the most vulgar ( i.e. Is it in your butt? Is it in your bra?) This pseudo-disgust also carried over into the discovery of the candy, which was almost never consumed once a player knew where it had been. Eating that candy became a mark of commitment to the game, and a show of how willing a player was to win by intimidating the others. The humor of the visual flavor (in the illustrations, layout, icons, and descriptions on cards) was noted by most of the playtesters as positive and a definite perversion of the original, kitschy designs of the original game.

Overall, the game was received positively, with players mostly having issues with the physical layout of the board, something that was addressed in its final version.

 

 

 

YOLO is a modded version of The game of LIFE. It is a card game that requires resource management of personal values in order to have the most fulfilling life and has optional improvisational storytelling mechanic. The instruction can be found here.

Iterations and goals.

1. Personal values were introduced to the original board game. Non-normative career cards were added (religious official, revolutionary, Übermensch, etc.), each with their own benefits. Our core theme was non-normativeness and a kind of pointlessness to what appeared to be significant in one’s life.
2. Branching paths were introduced to #1. Interesting narrative arcs were suggested as the main mechanic. The player should feel like he or she is not playing a game but is in fact participating in life itself.
3. As we kept adding in card mechanics to the board game, we realized this game could be simplified and be better as a card game. We changed #2 to a card game and tried to adjust appropriately, mainly using resource management. Personal values as a mechanic were fully integrated by this point, and the chaining system as a narrative arc was introduced.
4. YOLO system was introduced when we thought of what would count as the “win” condition while keeping in line with our core theme. The cash in and chaining systems were finalized with the YOLO points.
5. Balancing, lots and lots of balancing. Play testing and tweaking numbers, optimizing for three players.
6. Our final iteration: encouraging players to accumulate but ultimately throw away their personal values for that big moment of living life to the fullest, having only those carpe diem moments matter in the end, while admitting that these moments can only happen when players have something to lose. Storytelling element was for people who wanted to immerse themselves in the life revolving around those YOLO moments, to create meaning out of an otherwise meaningless life.

 

 

 

Risque

Risque is a multi-player spin off game of The well known board game Risk. Our iteration of the game has gotten rid of the many small concepts included in the game Risk such as the soldiers, the dice, the turns, and so on, which we felt were somewhat boring, elongated the game, and had no unique purpose when compared to other games. Instead, we kept the most basic element of the game: territory. By transferring the board onto the human body, body parts were able to become territories that other players may ‘conquer’. In this way, players are forced to interact with each other through touch; touching territories/body parts to conquer. Typically, the game would be played naked underneath th This does not mean it has to be awkward; Although it is bound to have some of that, the game goes through the movements quickly and with an upbeat song that causes players to quickly immerse themselves in the game and lose sight of their hesitations or inhibitions. In this way, we found that the game did a good job of introducing a ‘risque’ element while also keeping it fun enough that not any one player feels shamed, victimized, etc.

Instructions:

Here is a video of what a typical CD included with the game would include:

Credit for the Song: “Colors” by Tobu

Documentation:

http://vimeo.com/107627800

 

Description
The Its and the Bits™ is a mix of Snake, rolling chairs and music, themed in honor of the whimsical and ironic buzzword-laden world of corporate team-building exercises. Players split into two teams, the “Its” and the “Bits”. The “its” initially start off with just 1 player, who tries to consume all the others, who then join their team, while the “bits” run away. The game is fairly non-violent since while players run away and chase after each other, their goal is the back of another’s chair, so there’s no direct competition or reason to push people. At the same time, it is inclusive since players are always in play on either team until the very end. The game is marked by tension and release, as music controls whether players can use their legs to move fast or not. Ultimately, Its and the Bits™ should be fun to play–for whatever side you’re on!

Goals
Make a non-violent and inclusive version of musical chairs. The game should be easy to understand and fun to play, and should be playable with minimal materials found in an office or work environment.
Process
We initially brainstormed various different forms (live guitar, an ACTUAL orchestra, etc.) and uses of music (stop spinning, dancing, different information via wireless headphones, slow vs. fast).

We began by playing around with some spinny chairs. We tried grabbing onto each other in various formations: line, circle, pods of 2, etc. and found that while we originally thought we might use duct tape, hand grips are strong enough to do just about anything we might want (which ended up becoming the snake formation). We also tried various forms of maneuvering: using either feet or hands, and pushing off the ground, walls, or other players. We found that while feet are the easiest way to get around, you can do without by wiggling around, pushing off other players, and the walls. It was also pretty funny to look at. These became our two main game modes.

Iterations & Playtesting
Test 1: Playing live music via guitar
Observations: It was pretty cool, but hard enough to hear over the sounds of chairs rolling that players often struggled when they could move freely and vice versa. We were also concerned that the performer would have some bias towards when to start and stop the music. Thus we decided to opt for playing louder, generated music over speakers.

Test 2: When the music plays, the It can use their feet; bits struggle, and vice versa.
Observations: This made the game somewhat more interesting as players had to swap up their strategies, but ultimately was too confusing to explain and keep track of, and led to a lot of imbalance (if you were in the wrong place when the it came with music on, there was not much you could do). We kept the music/no music, but made it the same for both sides.

Test 3: The “it” only needs to touch another player to tag them.
Observations: This made it way to easy for the “it” to win, especially when it could use any of its members to reach out. We decided the “it” must grab the back of the chair, with 2 hands.

The Rules
Thousands of Fortune 100 companies have used our Enterprise-grade Its and the Bits™methodology to proactively bring new synergy to their work environment communications. Its and the Bits™ is a gamified form that is designed to get the whole corporation to work collaboratively.

Players: 3+ (Best played in big groups)

I went to the Game Fest expecting it to be in a large open field and was really surprised that the games were concentrated in a small fenced area. After wondering around a bit, I managed to play around three games: Turtle Wushu, A gulfball throwing game, and a Nashville card shooting game.

The card game was my favorite because the playing ground was a lot larger than the other games. We walked around in two teams and fought each other with cards. The player with the higher card gets to steal the loser’s card and in the end the two team leaders dueled. There was a funny moment in which I had to duel someone from across the street. Turtle Wushu was also an enjoyable game. The game involved players balancing toy turtles on your hand and knocking off turtles of another player. It reminded me of a varied version of Ninja. I think the most challenging game was the gulfball tossing game. You had to spin a pair of gulf balls at the right speed so that they would rope around metal bars. The challenge made the game a lot more enjoyable though.

 

 

Turtle Wushu:
A game a lot like Joust, which I found to actually be better. The physicality of the turtle gave tactile feedback, so I was always aware of the physical limitations of the actions I could take, whereas death in Joust seemed a bit arbitrary and dependent on the whims of the computer referee. The possibility of a large number of participants worked to its benefit, as each game took longer to play so the stakes felt higher. I might be biased because I tied for first place. There was some awkward tension involved also like in Joust, where I was initially hesitant to aggressively attack someone I didn’t know, especially that old woman who played with us.

Nashville:
Fun in concept, but poorly executed. The aimless wandering around did not work to its benefit. Everyone clumped together and stayed near the beginning area. The game really needed an incentive for the teams to spread out and wander actively to emphasize the role play aspect. The actual confrontation was also underwhelming, as the duels lacked any degree of appreciable complexity or strategy.

Also why was the beer so expensive?

The two most memorable games that I played at the Best Games Fest were Talahassee and… um… well, I don’t know the name, but it was played at me several times.

Talahassee was interesting in concept; the idea of setting out on an adventure with a posse is exciting. In practice, there was perhaps something missing. There was a lot of wandering around and the occasional bursts of excitement seemed a bit random and unbalanced. Perhaps more structured events to bring everyone together? I’d have to think about it a bit more, but the idea was fun.

The other game I played was ongoing. Players received a card with an instruction to make something happen: someone needed to say a word, someone needed to take two pictures of you, etc. If you succeeded, you set off a party popper. If you pushed too hard, you could be called out by the people you were talking to.

This game was played at me more than I played. I actually got into a nice conversation with someone about Marvel movies before he exploded a popper in my face and ran away giggling. I resent this.

Turtle Wushu:

(Rules!) I found Turtle Wushu to be quite enjoyable because the interaction was short and there was an ever present possibility of chaos. It wasn’t wise to play it in the dark because you had to search for your turtle in the dark. It was like a way too severe punishment for loosing. I lost every turtle ):  It’s also nice to learn because the game is simple enough that it would be easy to instigate this game under many circumstances.

The You Win Card Game:

I liked this game because it was ambient and ever lasting. You take a card that has a win condition on it. For example: You see someone wipe their nose, You get someone to take a picture of you, you win a thumb war. If you are found out trying to win… you loose, so you have to be sneaky. If you succeed in covertly accomplishing your goal. You get to fire off a party popper! This was quite effective in instigating random interactions with strangers, which was a pleasant if a bit awkward.

 

My experience at the best games fest was pretty interesting. When I first arrived at the site, it looked….nothing like I expected. The community space that the event took place on did not really scream “community” at first glance. I was judging everything before I even started playing.

The games themselves, however, made me not want to leave the event. Now, I’m not really sure if that’s due to the games themselves, or the people playing them and the environment created by everyone’s “alternative gaming” presence, but I still did have a lot of fun.

The first game I played was called Turtle…something. I personally think it should have been called Ninja Turtle, due to it’s similarities to the game Ninja and its inclusion of turtle game pieces. In a fashion similar to the hand-slappy-ness of ninja, the players must use only one hand to slap a turtle out of other players’ hands, while simultaneously balancing a small turtle toy in their own other hand. Unlike Ninja, however, the players are allowed to roam around, in a style more like the Joust game we played in class. The game was much more fast paced than joust, which allowed for a gameplay more like swordplay (I even had a standoff where I really felt like I was sword fighting). The only issue I saw with the game was that some players decided to hide and run away while everyone else killed each other so that they could survive until the end. And even if the player wasn’t trying to hide, I found myself avoiding everyone whenever people got into their own little standoffs. The gameplay mostly went very smoothly, however, and I enjoyed it a lot.

 

The second game that I played, and my favorite out of all of them, was a game called You Win (I believe that was the name…). With a passive style of gameplay, the player is given a card with a goal that they must attempt to achieve without letting any other players know. Once the goal is achieved, they pop several party poppers that correspond to the amount listed on their goal card. I played this game HOURS after I left the event. I really enjoyed the passive gameplay that allowed players to insert this game into their daily routine, or even into the other games they were playing. You can win at any time, and confusing the people around you who aren’t playing is one of my favorite parts of the game. I think a game like this would be really fun to bring to large scale events, like concerts or conventions.

3 to 10 Nashville:

Everyone is first handed a game map with an area traced out to represent “Nashville” (Community Lawn vicinity) and a random face card to identify which team they’re on. Those given a red card are the law, and those given a black card are the outlaws. Amongst each team, one person is designated as the team leader – either the bandit for the outlaws, or the sheriff for the law.

Everyone is then given 6 cards of their team’s color (ranging from values of 3 to 10) to be used in the game. The idea is that the members of the two teams duel each other with these cards in a series of individual 1 on 1 shootouts that allow them to accumulate cards for their leaders to use in a final shootout. A normal shootout works like this:

Both people choose a card from their hand to use in the shootout. No matter the outcome, both of these cards are “spent” and immediately ripped up (think of the cards as bullets that aren’t reusable). Whoever had the higher card is the winner and gets to choose a card at random from the other player’s hand to be kept and saved for their leader. If the shootout ends in a tie, the cards just get ripped up and no one gets to draw a card.

Players can prowl freely in the area marked on the map. Upon encountering someone from the opposing team, a shootout may happen. One person first asks, “Are you from Nashville?” to which the other replies, “Them’s fighting words!” and then the shootout commences. No two people can duel against each other more than once. After 30 minutes of walking around and dueling, everyone reconvenes in the lawn. In the final shootout, each leader gets to use all (or maybe it was just X number) of the cards that their team won for them. Each winning shot earns that leader a point. Players’ unused cards can be used to help deflect the opposing leader’s shots. The leader with the most points at the end of the shootout wins the game for their team.

It was a pretty long game without a lot of action happening for most of it. My team split up into smaller groups and just wandered around separately. Besides the few shootouts, I found that we spent most of the time just walking and talking about our personal lives. Also, since we were only given 6 cards, we could duel at most only 6 times, and that’s only if we kept winning. Supposing that each shootout takes less than a minute, that leaves about 24 minutes of downtime.

At one point, we saw a bunch of tough looking guys. Someone in my small walking group instinctively yelled out, “Are you from Nashville?!” They gave us a quizzical look. Some people got very into character. I think the flavor and roleplaying aspect definitely made the game. The best strategy seemed to be to play your highest card(s) first to prevent others from stealing your good cards. And once we were left with only crappy cards, a bunch of us suicided by dueling with the other team and forcing them to sacrifice their cards in the duel. Was that the right strategy? Or should we have saved our crappy cards for protecting our leader? Not sure, but there wasn’t much to do, so I just used them in the shootouts anyway.

You Win:

Each person takes a card. How to Play from the card:

Subtly try to achieve the goal on the back of this card. If you achieve your goal, YOU WIN. Celebrate by firing your party popper(s) and shouting “I WIN!” If you tell someone your goal, try too hard to win, or someone catches you trying to win, YOU LOSE. Get another card and try again.

It was a very background-level game. I didn’t stay for long after getting this card, but I can imagine someone just shoving this card in their back pocket and playing it for the duration of the night. I don’t know what other tasks there were, but mine said:

 YOU WIN IF… someone takes off an article of clothing. It is worth 2 Party Poppers.

I’m guessing that all of them were things that could be potentially awkward if done un-subtly. Since your targets can be non-players and there’s no strict structure to the game/whom you can interact with, there doesn’t seem to be much motivation to win – it’s just you against your tiny square card. It’s an interesting idea for a game though. Everyone in your proximity immediately becomes a player in some sense without even being aware of it.

Turtle Wushu: It felt like I’d played it before. I mean I could same about Johannes Sebastian Joust, but that game has unique elements that makes it a “new game.” Turtle Wushu felt like a low-tech Joust, and it’s hurt for that. In Turtle Wushu you’re the judge, the jury, and the executioner. Too much responsibility on your hand makes it more about the turtle than the people around you. Joust is never about the controller: I have a firm grip on it and I trust my sense of motion, so I only look at the faces of those around me and enjoy the social interaction that arises.

 

Unwanted Entities: As a game it was broken. We managed to rig the system to run back and forth and score points quickly. We lost because we didn’t play defensively, but our strategy + waiting in order to play more responsively/defensively would have been an easy win (we lost by 10 points, which is the smallest amount of points you can score). The game had a “surprise ending” that this game was actually about gentrification and moving the “unwanted entities” out of one neighborhood an into another. This was something I guess early on, so it had no real shock value or moral implications, but rather I was running around with sticks and placing them in chalk squares.

 

Mont Trottoir: How to win — start the game first, and use your avalanche second. Also I have to mention this, I was on a team with Paolo and some girl, and the girl on our team had no idea how to take big steps. This is important when you can only take two steps per turn. The game was fun and “it was a close win” but there was realistically no way for us to win. The “game master” was strict on some rules and really lax on others, making it frustrating when you don’t know which way he’ll lean. Playing cards while hopping around in a turn-based mountain climbing game was weird, it felt like that part of the game could have been better devised. Like what if each person on the expedition had real items they had to carry in a backpack, and each item represented an action you could take. Having a slightly larger commitment to the gameplay at hand would help with the mountain climbing illusion.